Marina Abramovic

Doesn't take much to amaze people these days? Sad world we live in. Anyway , time will erode all the superficiality away ..all in time.

I like the way her body gives life to the skeleton through her breathing..

And I love how this video has som much more views thans her others. Nudity on youtube is a mega hit! ;)

What a load of pretentious shite!

Sorry about being too prolix, but I feel I needed to speak my mind here even though it is not the best place.
If it helps, read about asceticism and the act of achieving spriritual bliss through self-immolation. I believe someone said it here before that she was the granddaughter of Varnava, a serbian patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That has a lot to do with the way her perfomances are dealt with, the absence of food, alcohol and sleep.

Take care,
Victor.

Spot on Victor :)

About the meaning being arbitrary. There is NO meaning, but meanings. The skeleton may be hers through projection, as it follows the same position she has. There is a logic here, but that does not mean I am right.
I don't think arbitrary is the word. If I explain to you the meaning of my work, I am selling it short to you, making it easy for you to understand the effort I had to come up with an image of death, dying or the permance of residues (skeleton) when we part.

the problem here is that effort reads in the eye of most people as strenuous physical work and not as mental elucubration and the capacity of creating an image that may distress, disturb, enrage or move in any other way.
I don't think this work is a tour de force in no way, but just think about it for a while and try to get in touch with the possible particular meaning of this.

you may be right, although I think, after reading her books and interviews that she actually has no intention of making her work ressonate one meaning only. Of course, this sounds like she's evading thinking about her work and just using rhetoric.
I do believe I was glorifying her work without knowing why, because I have some serious doubts about this issue, but instead of vivisecting every showman I simply view the work as an experience to be felt and thought about, like a movie.

I see the honey, and the blade, the blood, the star, the skull and the body to be symbolic tools used by the artist to communicate a spiritual/carnal way of cleasing, purifying, desecrating, stressing, wounding and marking the figure of the artist and all that is human.
Again, this may sound like pretentious crap but you can also see aborigenes doing their trance rituals and scoff, saying it is showmanship. Maybe it is, but the fact the person believes there is something there, makes it real.